A Short History Of the Queer Poets Society, London 1997–1999
In February 1997, I saw a listing in the gay press looking for contributors who might want to form a spoken word and performance troupe to be dubbed The Queer Poets Society. Maurice was holding interviews in the basement bar of First Out Café, just off Tottenham Court Road in central London. I called the landline number listed (this was before mobile phones and most of the internet). I got through to Maurice and arranged to meet up. I asked how I would recognise him. He was emphatic that no description was required, as he could not be missed.
Maurice recruited several poets, forming the core of the Queer Poets Society:
Mrs Orange was a story teller, a prose fiction writer more than a poet. She would sit down in a cosy, fire-lit atmosphere and tell short tales of adventure and weirdness, drawing the audience in to a humorous lunacy.
Maurice himself was a theatrical practitioner of the outré: outlandish in angry camp, the shouting provocative.
I wrote to a friend about Lucy Ramwell, on March 10th 1998: ‘Lucy’s poetry is spanking and rampant. Spinning through neologisms and bright, idiomatic flashes, she buckles and re-forges language in a sailing, free-falling, pacey and dense rodomontade.’ (My correspondence pertaining to The Queer Poets is now held electronically by The Bishopsgate Institute.)
Over the next couple of months, we wrote, rehearsed, compiled and collated our first show. We rehearsed and practised in a large room above The Clockhouse, a gay bar in Clapham that let us use the space for free. We were scheduled for the basement bar of First Out on May 28th 1997.
I had ambitious ideas for the show ( Correspondence, April 7th 1997):
‘The introduction to Cruising Ground — in the voice of David Attenborough:
Let us watch them now
as they go through the motions
of their strange courtship ritual.
And what a dance it is
solemn and splendid
as they display to each other
the beauty of their feathers.
- needs a courtship ritual behind it. Whatever our dancers wish to devise is fine by collaborative me, either serious in cruising dress or serious in pink boas with feathers and fans… Once our birds have disappeared into the bushes, the statue in the background turns to the audience to speak its brief lines.’
Our opening number for the first show had two street hawkers on an East End market, pitching their wears:
One hawker had little to sell: Straights! Breeders! That was all their variety. The other had a gorgeous, ever expanding horde of synonyms on offer:
We’ve got your tomboys and your bumboys, your faggots and your dykes, your faeries and your pooftas. We’ve got flamboyant and musical types, shirt-lifters and nancy boys. We’ve got butches and femmes and brown hatters, your bull-dykes and baby-dykes. And — especially for you missis — we’ve got some lovely lipstick lesbians! Fresh in today. Two for a pound. Roll up! Roll up! Roll up!
The piece contained 78 abusive synonyms that we’d brainstormed and re-appropriated. Unfortunately no copy remains but, as you might imagine, it contained all the usual suspects, and perhaps more. This was a time when part of being queer was about reclaiming or gazumping the language of hate, turning abusive terms around and disarming them to instead celebrate our fabulousness and diversity. Such terms became a vivid nomenclature of our creativity, originality and challenge to the heteronormative, a banner of our cultural centrality. But, believe me, even though I’d had many of those terms hurled at me myself, memorizing a straight list of 78 bent nouns was quite a challenge as a performer!
In advance of the show at First Out, the queer poets were invited guests on Greater London Radio’s LGBT magazine programme, The Lavender Lounge, on May 15th 1997, alongside Edmund White. In advance of the show, there had been some debate about what we were and were not allowed to say during our appearance, with regard to sex and sexual language. So I read a pretty lyric about love instead of one which mentioned dangerous bodily fluids. However, I now believe the passed on instructions had been misunderstood and the only issue really was about not saying ‘fuck’ — the language request was standard BBC practice and not a homophobic prohibition around sexual/sexuality expression per se. So even here regulation, and the internalised legacy of regulation of sexual expression, had its repercussions in self-censorship.
But the show in the basement bar at First Out was a stonking success. When people upstairs heard the furore, they crowded down the balustrade to see what was kicking off in the packed bar. We strutted our queer, poetic stuff. It was a blast. We felt very cutting edge, darlings.
The Queer Poets Society next performed on the cabaret stage of London Pride, held on Clapham Common on July 5th 1997. We were offered £10 each! And access to a plastic dustbin filled with ice water in which floated various bottled and canned beverages. Getting paid for doing queer stuff was a rare occurrence!
Over the summer of 1997, the group picked up a couple of new members: Caroline and Tony. Caroline, Tony, myself, Lucy and Maurice feature in the programme distributed at our second show, Verbal Ecstasy which took place at The Clockhouse in Clapham sometime during October 1997. The programme also announces our next show, at the Poetry Café, on November 27th 1997.
The Clockhouse was a big space, like a village hall, with a raised stage at one end. The audience, though, was sparse. Maurice had done an interview with QX Magazine and we’d tried to recruit an audience by word of mouth. In the days before the internet, and when homophobia had not been as thoroughly degraded as it is now, it was hard to get the word out. Equally, Spoken Word was not the stellar genre it has since become — it was a minority pursuit within the minority pursuit of queerness within the white-male, gay-bar mainstream. It was hard to tell who had come for the show (few) and who would have been there anyway (most of the not many).
There was already some tension about the direction of the group, at least between Maurice and myself. With regard to show content, Maurice advocated simultaneously a therapeutic function of poetry and an aggressively ‘in yer face’ attitude. My frustration with both of these comes through in the (yes, now slightly embarrassing) QPS News Sheet of October ’97 for the Clockhouse programme:
“The Queer Poets are having a rest until New Year” I wrote on December 12th 1997 (Correspondence). Additionally, in the earlier QX magazine interview about the troupe, Maurice had provided the magazine with a full face portrait of himself, rather than the QPS group shot, and this is what was published as representative of the group. You can imagine the outrage!
However, I don’t believe it was wholly these differences that led to Maurice drifting away from the group early in the next year. I can’t remember the exact troupe politics of it, or the personal ins and outs of other players and am ignorant of what issues may have overtaken Maurice in his own life — or whether, simply, the difficulties of generating an audience disheartened him — but, by March ’98, I was writing, ‘Jenny (Mrs Orange) and Lucy and myself seem to be the remaining core of the Queer Poets. We had a meeting here last Sunday, to formulate a direction. We shall do a couple of gigs for the Pride Arts Festival (PAF!) come the summer, but that’s about it,’ ( Correspondence, March 27th).
As we went on without him, Maurice refused to allow us to continue to call ourselves The Queer Poets Society. The poster for our Pride Arts Festival productions begins, ‘ Not The Queer Poets Society brings you…’ as Lucy and Mrs Orange and I brought the audience ‘an intelligent riot of performance poetry… after which debonair display, the floor will be thrown open to all comers.’
By this time, we’d also picked up the musician and singer Steve Anthony, providing some atmospheric, musical backing to poem performances as well as his own songs.
But the Rhythmic Query show at The Poetry Café on June 22nd 1998 proved to be the finale of the Queer Poets. We each then each went our separate ways. Lucy, now Lucy Aphramor still performs (you can find her website here.) Where Mrs Orange and Maurice are now, I don’t know, nor can I find any internet presence for them.
In the summer of 1998, I studied for a certificate to Teach English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) and would soon be off to my first job doing that — in Odessa, Ukraine. (I spent a lot of my youth going elsewhere — this, again, I read as a societally impelled: the exile of homosexuality.) However, before heading abroad, I gave queer performance poetry one last fling and organised an LGBT event for the 1999 Pride Arts Festival:
Homophone: an open mic at The Poetry Café, hosted by yours truly — in the guise of Alexi Calquia (get it?) A pound! Free! And still nobody came. Well, about six people. Yeah, queer spoken word hadn’t really taken off at that time, nor knowledge of it found wide dissemination.
One guy who did come along, however, was Ernesto Sarezale, who carries the banner for queer performance poetry into the present day and is currently engaged in making a feature film about the development of contemporary LGBT spoken word in London.
Not The End
Originally published at http://idqinternational.wordpress.com on May 23, 2020.